Diversity is essential to the
success of any endeavor, from scientific research to Broadway
musicals.

By Fred Guterl

Newsweek International

May 9 issue - President George W. Bush has won plaudits
for the diversity of his cabinet officials, most notably when he promoted
Condoleezza Rice, an African-American woman, to secretary of State in his second
term. Is this the kind of diversity that makes the White House team better
equipped to come up with creative solutions to world problems? It is, according
to the conventional wisdom in management circles, which for years has held that
a diverse team is a creative one.

advertisement

The idea is simple.
When people of different points of view get together, they question each other's
way of doing things and habits of thought. From this collision of different ways
of looking at the world come new ideas—creativity. But what kind of diversity is
most important for ensuring creativity? Researchers at Northwestern University
set out to answer that question. Their results, published last week in the
journal Science, suggest that although diversity is essential, ethnicity, race
and gender may not be the most critical factors in fostering creativity.

The scientists sought to compare successful teams with
less successful ones, and figure out exactly how they differed in composition.
They focused on a few academic fields, defining successful teams as those whose
papers were most frequently cited. They also looked at the annals of Broadway
musicals over the past century and studied how the mix of composers, lyricists,
directors and so forth correlated with the success of the production, measured
in terms of the number of weeks a production ran before closing.

What they found was that the most successful teams did
two things right. First, they attracted a mixture of experienced people and
those who were newcomers to whichever field they were in. That's not
surprising—the need for fresh blood has long been recognized as an important
ingredient in success. The second criterion, though, was far less obvious. What
successful teams had in common was at least a few experienced members who had
never collaborated with each other. "People have a tendency to want to work with
their friends—people they've worked with before," says Luis Amaral, a physicist
at Northwestern and a coauthor. "That's exactly the wrong thing to do."

The most illuminating examples come from the Broadway
musicals. "West Side Story" was considered to be a breakthrough for many
reasons, not least the innovative use of dance and music to tell the story of
the Sharks and the Jets. Among the handful of creators, though, were newcomers
to Broadway (lyricist Steven Sondheim) as well as experienced people who hadn't
collaborated before (composer Leonard Bernstein had never worked with
choreographer Peter Gennaro). Broadway's worst decade, by contrast, came when it
had a surfeit of big names, including Cole Porter, Gilbert and Sullivan, and
Rodgers and Hammerstein. The problem, from the standpoint of creativity, is that
these mavens—or "incumbents," as the authors call them—fell into the habit of
collaborating with the same people repeatedly. As a result, between 1920 and
1930, 87 percent of Broadway musicals flopped, says coauthor Brian Uzzi, a
business professor at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. (On average,
75 percent of musicals are flops.) "The Broadway musical industry had some of
the biggest names ever," says Uzzi, "but the shows were too full of incumbents
and repeat relationships."

One of the interesting things about this study is that it
helps makes sense of the macro notion that relationships among innovators in an
industry are an important ingredient in success. Studies have shown that part of
the reason Silicon Valley is so good at spawning new companies is that there's
such an extended network of people who worked together earlier in their careers.
In Boston's Route 128 beltway, by contrast, networks are more "clumpy"—people
tend to work with the same people, who in turn tend to be isolated from their
counterparts at other companies. If more teams were formed with an eye to
bringing together veterans who hadn't previously worked together, it would, over
time, lead to a more Silicon Valley-like distribution of talent.

The study also suggests a role for technology in bringing
seasoned people together. Tacit Knowledge Systems, a start-up in Palo Alto,
California, is marketing a computer system that links people with similar
professional interests. The system monitors e-mail in a corporation or other
large organization and keeps tabs on what employees are interested in. If a
worker is looking for somebody to collaborate with, he or she can query the
system to find somebody appropriate. Tacit is developing a new version that
actively forges connections by prompting employees when it finds people who, on
the basis of shared interests, might make a good team. Finding a way to maximize
creative potential is one of the most pressing problems in corporations. Knowing
what makes one team more creative than another is an important first step.